MEB Adds Value

What do article counts tell you?

Imagine you're looking for the buzz on a specific topic - for example, a client of mine wanted to know about how the word greenwashing was seen by the public, in order to assess its use in a fundraising campaign.

One of the approaches I took to answer her question was to count the number of articles that have the word greenwashing in them, by year. I decided to test this on two different databases -- Factiva.com and Google News Archive. I searched for the word and then limited my search by year, counted the number of articles retrieved, and put that information in an Excel spreadsheet.

Using Excel's graphing feature, I created a simple line graph showing that -- in the US business press, at least -- the use of the word greenwashing peaked 2009. Obviously, there's more to this story; this is just one way of creating insight from something as simple as search result counts.

Making information consistent

One of my clients wanted to identify trade conferences at which his CEO might speak, in order to enhance the company's profile as innovative and proactive. I found a number of conferences' web sites; the problem was that the information my client needed was often buried within several web pages. Rather than give him a data dump of web pages, I created a template with the information points my client cared about, and just filled in the blanks for each conference.

Answering a question

Here's an example of when I had a series of specific questions regarding the requirements of employees to include specific items in their summary plan descriptions as required by the Employee Retirement.... I'll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that, after an in-depth discussion with my client, we had clarified the project to answering a series of questions. Based on the answers, my client was going to make a strategic recommendation regarding employee benefits.

Since we both knew exactly what issues he needed clarified, I built the deliverable around each question. I provided a short answer, then a longer explanation behind the answer, followed by the full text of the material I had gathered.

Some info pros balk at the idea of "providing answers"; in this case, it was exactly what was called for.

Here's what the table of contents and a sample question look like.

 

 

Would you rather be perfect or just excellent?

I often tell about one of the first times I had to really think about the format of my deliverable. I had done what amounted to a market research report, but all I had was a lot of text. I spent a full day not doing the final formatting and design -- washing the dogs, pruning the roses, vacuuming the car... it wasn't pretty.

When the deadline was looming, I dragged myself back to my office, sat myself down, and spent 15 minutes looking for examples of market research reports on consulting firms' web sites. Pretty quickly, I figured out what was visually appealing to me -- lots of white space, color in the headings, lots of graphs and charts, and pull-quotes highlighting key points.

Once I had that ah-ha moment, I got to work creating meaningful charts, adding color to all my headings, added those pull-quotes, and making it look as appealing as I could. At that point, I could have stopped, spent another day busily procrastinating and worrying about whether the font color should be navy blue or midnight blue, whether Verdana is better than Candara, and comparing my format to those of 15 or 20 more examples. And I never would have gotten that report out.

As you think about what you could do to add more value to a project, remember that it doesn't have to be perfect. As long as you know that it enables your client to make a decision or take the next step, how you create your report is up to you.

What's MEB Adds Value?

So, what's this blog all about, anyway?  A lot of what I write and speak about boils down to how info pros and knowledge workers can move beyond finding and organizing information, and create real value with their insight. (Want to see what I've spoken about recently? See Bates Extras for my recent slide decks.)

MEBaddsValue.com is where I am putting any thoughts or insights into how to add value to research.

Your comments and examples are welcome.

Making information valuable

One of the many ideas for which Stewart Brand is rightfully known is his quote from 1987, presciently describing the current challenge of information professionals:

"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."

This blog looks at how we can make information immeasurably valuable to the recipient.